Emerging Voices 5: Maria Mulvany

Maria Mulvany is an early career researcher funded by an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship. Based at University College Dublin (UCD), Mulvany’s project “Ghostly Fictions: Haunting, Trauma and Time in Contemporary Irish Historical Fiction” engages with recent literary, queer and psychoanalytic theories of spectrality…

Research Pioneers 13: Kathryn Laing

Kathryn Laing has a career-long research expertise in women’s writing and Irish women’s writing in particular. Her wide-ranging publications focus on the works of Hannah Lynch, Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf, and Edna O’Brien. Together with Faith Binckes, she’s co-written the study Hannah Lynch, 1859-1904:…

A Case for Editorial and Curatorial Interventions

Anna Pilz & Whitney Standlee, Network Team In the papers of Katharine Tynan Hinkson held at the John Rylands Library in Manchester is a strongly worded letter from 1902 that attests to the difficulties that tend to assail the editors of volumes of literature….

From the archives: Annie M.P. Smithson Correspondence with Edmund Downey

Kathleen Williams, Network Team In 2016 staff at the John J. Burns Library at Boston College had opportunity to review a large collection of materials related to Irish women during the revolutionary period in Ireland that had been assembled by collector Loretta Clarke Murray. …

Reflections on the lockdown

We asked members to share their experiences of life in lockdown. In these strange times, we wonder, how quarantine is impacting our lives as scholars, students, and academics. Working from home is now the reality for so many globally. New work and research practices…

Letters and the archive: Kate O Brien and Mary O Malley

Dr. Barry Houlihan The correspondence of writers offers a significant insight into their personal as well as professional lives, revealing much about the networks in which they communicate and circulate ideas. Such archival sources can counter other public and more official sources and narratives…

MINING THE WORKS OF IRISH WOMEN WRITERS, PART II

Kathleen Williams See Mining the works of Irish Women Writers Part 1 here. In 2005, granted a two-month research leave from the Boston College Libraries, I worked on a project that sought to raise visibility of Irish women writers.  The project included creating an…

Mining the Works of Irish Women Writers, Primary Sources in Archival Collections

Kathleen Williams As researchers, particularly those exploring Irish women’s writings know, challenges abound!  Just as many of the works of Irish women writers have been hidden, so have, or indeed, still are, the primary sources that would foster greater understanding of the women and…

An Appreciation of Winifred Letts

“An Appreciation of Winifred Letts” [1] Dr. David Clare, Mary Immaculate College, UL   Winifred Letts was born in Salford, in what is now Greater Manchester, in 1882 to an English vicar father and an Irish mother. As a child, she greatly enjoyed the…

The Mystery of the Disappeared Drishane Archive

By Julie Anne Stevens Research recalls detective work. The scholar follows clues to solve unanswered questions or to reveal forgotten or overlooked information. The archive gives opportunity to track clues, and while one of scholarship’s pleasures lies in this search, one of its compulsions…